Fleming Teaches Master Class, Scenes

Fleming Teaches Master Class, Scenes

LAURA E. SMITH Festival Focus Writer

One of superstar soprano Renée Fleming’s signature roles in her career has been Countess Almaviva in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, but did you know it was in Aspen that she first learned and performed the role?

The year was 1983. The young Renée arrived open to everything, and much came. “It was a very sweet time on my life, with blue skies, serious musicians, and endless possibilities,” she remembers in her book, The Inner Voice. “I bicycled seven miles up to the Maroon Bells and back down every day…After a winter in Rochester, a summer in Aspen is an almost unimaginable reward, and every year I could hardly wait to pack up my suitcase and my bicycle and get back there.”

She describes that she was more full of wonder than fire at that time. “I wasn’t making any major life pronouncements at that time,” she recalled in a 2016 interview. “I just seemed to follow things along as they kept leading me from one thing to another. The fighting stage came a little bit later.”

When, in her second year in Aspen, she was cast as the Countess in the Mozart, it seems, however, something was found. She went on to make some of her most important professional debuts in this role, including at the Metropolitan Opera, Houston Grand Opera, San Francisco Opera, and Glyndebourne.

The role is, as she says, “incredibly challenging because it requires a certain pristine perfection. There are just so many skills required, but I credit Mozart as one of my best voice teachers for that reason.”

In Aspen in 1983, it was then-AMFS Music Director Jorge Mester who heard her and singled her out, and suggested she go to Juilliard for a postgraduate program. Part of the excitement of a program like Aspen’s, she recalls, “is that you never know who is going to be in the audience or the orchestra pit, holding your fate in his hands.”

This week, it is Fleming herself holding so much, giving so much, as she returns to Aspen to perform at a sold-out recital and also to teach today’s young students at the Aspen Music Festival and School.

Soprano and AMFS alumna Renée Fleming leads a special event master class on July 30 and then performs with the Emerson String Quartet on August 1.

AMFS Artistic Administrator and Artistic Advisor Asadour Santourian notes that it is “most gratifying” when artists who have reached such high levels in their career return as alumni to Aspen. “Not only does their return signify a homecoming,” he says, “but they’re incredibly generous with sharing their experience, their knowledge.”

He goes on to say that “There’s a great deal of the unspoken that happens with their presence on our grounds that is so meaningful to our students. For an aspiring young artist who is here studying, they can then say, ‘This can happen to me, too. This is part of the endless, limitless possibility for me.’ ”

Audiences have the opportunity to witness Fleming teaching twice, at a master class for young vocalists on July 30 at 1 pm at Harris Concert Hall and at an opera scenes master class on August 3 at 10 am at the Wheeler Opera House. Ticket availability is limited.